Lottery scam targets smartphone owners

Bogus text messages inform users they have won the 'GSM Mobile Sweepstakes'

Security experts have warned of a new round of '419' email lottery scams targeting European smartphone users.

Bogus text messages inform users that they have won the 'GSM Mobile Sweepstakes' contest and landed a €170,000 prize.

In order to claim the prize, recipients are instructed to respond to a Yahoo webmail address. A reply offers to send the prize in the form a cheque mailed to the user.

However, in order to pay for the insurance and shipping charges on the cheques, the user is asked to foot a bill ranging from €595 to €1,890.

The scammers then pocket the supposed shipping costs and the user receives nothing.

Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said: "Obviously you can't win a lottery if you haven't bought a ticket in the first place.

"These guys just want you to pay for the 'courier delivery' of your 'cheque parcel'."

Security experts have warned that mobile messaging could become a new frontier for cyber-crime owing to booming numbers of new users and a relatively inexperienced security field in comparison to the PC industry.

In addition to spam runs and 419 scams, the practice of SMS phishing, or 'smishing', has gained steam in recent years.

Users are also faced with a growing crop of malware applications which target the operating systems used by smartphone devices.